Category Archives: Advanced Computing

This Boston Consulting Group report by Massimo Portincaso, Arnaud de la Tour, and Philippe Soussan, discusses seven categories of so-called deep-tech areas of research that are likely to yield new disruptions for businesses of all types. They believe that deep-tech industries are no longer dominated by larger companies doing incremental research, but ratherby small, nimble enterpreneurial firms finding and developing solutions for novel use cases.

They claim we are moving into a phase in which truly new types of infrastructure for business uses is emerging. And the development of these new uses requires a whole ecosystem– a band of cooperating players, including technicians, investors large and small, and firms who have use cases– rather than simply a firm, some financing, and a product. This differs from the ‘maker’ approach to innovation, which believes we can just set people working with some simple tools, and they will come up with the products the world needs.

I support this ecosystem approach, not the more limited one. As an example I call your attention to NYMIC, the New York Maritime Innovation Center, started by my colleague Dr Chris Clott of SUNY Maritime. It fits exactly into the role of helping create a good ecosystem for innovation in the maritime field, one which greatly needs stimulants to produce service improvements. Its motto is “Convene, Connect, Catalyze”, which exactly expresses what BCG’s discussion here is saying.

Matt Leonard @Matt_Lnrd has summarized Gartner’s survey in this article, which seems to indicate more clearly that blockchain is a solution chasing problems. The basic problems are “technology immaturity”, “lack of standards”, ‘too ambitious scope”, and a misunderstanding of the use cases. I think Gartner has made a fair assessment of the situation, if perhaps even a bit too enthusiastic! So much hype over blockchain, and so much development investment, forces companies to take a look at a technology that basically duplicates what many systems already do. In short, the use case doesn’t hold up.

We need trust between partners in our supply chains. Supply chains are all about cooperation, and current systems have nearly the same capacity for verification that blockchain based systems do. What current systems lack is an easy way to provide access for partners, and to control it. So the trustless paradigm is not immediately relevant. It might be in some of the commodity tracking uses Gartner details, though how it would prevent blatant fraud is not clear.

Gartner is also right about the impending balkanization of blockchain systems. Each one is its own chain, but logistics partnerships are shifting constantly. What’s needed is connections between blockchains so data can be translated between them readily. Gartner refers to them as APIs; in the old days, we called them middleware. It would be great, as one survey participant indicated, to have a replacement for a peer-to-peer system (EDI) which allows many to many communication without the hassle, but that is not what blockchain proponents are suggesting.

Finally, the lack of standards is a major problem for supply chains. Supply chains are about cooperation, and cooperation requires agreement on standards. My partner Chris Clott and I have written about the need in the maritime supply chain world, and there’s more coming. In fact, several groups have started up intending to create standards. (See the BCG article below.) Experience shows that standards take a while (read l..oo…oo..ng time) to become accepted. And there’s substantial evidence that standard setting in a top-down fashion is more likely to fail and less likely to get a good ecosystem of cooperating providers than evolution from the bottom up based on specific solutions to particular use cases. (See article by Hanseth etal below).

From this viewpoint, it’s actually good that there has not been too much success yet, and that there are still lots of entrepreneurial attempts at creating useful solutions to specific logistics and supply chain problems. Whether these can use blockchain or some other database technology is uncertain, but the effort is going to yield some progress, though over a longer time frame than we expect. I’m thinking more in the time frame of ERP’s rise as a must-have system, maybe 20 years.